Thom has all the rights in the world to be busy with his studies/being sick or whatever, but it makes you wonder ...

If Thom where to jump ship (which gets ever more likely the more time passes) will OSnews be able to survive?

(If Thom were to turn rouge or greedy he could just start his own site and take all the advertisement(which I block with AB+) money for himself and pay for CO2 reduction to save the planet. Wouldn't that be something?)

I'm sympathetic to your "requirements." I would absolutely prefer to have small, text-based ads tucked into the margins of the OSNews site. Just like the people who make TV shows would prefer that you be able to watch them without being interrupted with commercials.

Problem is, nobody will pay any money for small text links in the margins. People advertise because they want their advertisements to get noticed.

I'm pulled in two different directions as far as advertising intrusion goes. If it were up the advertisers, they'd take over the whole page and have loud music and dancing cats. Of course the readers don't want any advertising at all. It's a real balancing act to try to have advertising that's prominent enough that they'll pay money, but not so intrusive that it pisses off the readers.

As for supporting the site, if for whatever reason you feel you can't stand to view the site with ads, I'd ask that you consider using the Shopping page when you look for items to buy. That way we can make a little money from our commission with Amazon and Nextag: http://www.osnews.com/shopping

As for Thom, I'll have to give a mea culpa. When Thom needs to take a break, I need to pick up the slack and post more stories. We'll try to do a better job of coordinating.

Affiliation seems like the practical way to go. We need to _massively_ improve the shopping experience and bring back other community-based revenue streams such as memberships and we could also offer a community advertising programme, where the community can buy ads on the site for their own projects they want to draw attention to.